London Overground Page 21

  Each breath nearer the last. We say it aloud but we are not convinced. The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond. We echo and quote instead of revealing what we think we mean, or what we mean to mean. The wild surmises of that walk over Hampstead’s glacial debris, the skull of the hill with its plaques to Freud and Sir Edward Elgar (HERE HE COMPOSED / THE MUSIC MAKERS / FALSTAFF / THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND), kept us going, secure within our established roles. I had much more to say, but I would save it for the book. Andrew was calculating: first, the distance to the next bite, and then how he would have to postpone his bike ride back to Hastings and borrow a Hackney bed for the night.

  When the circuit of the Overground was done, and it had to be all of a piece, a single day, in order to download its secrets, I would have to come back to Maresfield Gardens. I combined an afternoon visit with a walk from Willesden Junction to Willesden Green, thereby transporting after-images of the paintings of Leon Kossoff into this scrupulously preserved house of memory. Marina Warner, introducing 20 Maresfield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum London, draws attention to the self-sacrificing piety of Anna Freud’s ‘act of enshrinement’. Warner reads it as a way of seeing her father ‘as an event in history, a new geography of the mind, not only a person’.

  And I’m sure she’s right: the redbrick villa with its tidy front garden keeping the road at a safe distance, and its generous allocation of windows, like an art school or dance studio, has become a portrait of the dying man. You step inside, at permitted hours, as if offering yourself up as a suitable case for treatment; a role I could never contemplate. ‘Mental pain is without end,’ says Max Ferber, the Manchester painter in Sebald’s 1992 book, The Emigrants. But the notion of spilling the mess of memory, rehashing accounts of dreams (as dreary a business as conversations misdescribing the plot of Breaking Bad), was far too high a price to pay for normality. For acquiring some hygienic husk of personality as your safety mask in the world.

  The first task is to find somebody prepared to sell you a ticket. Rooms beyond rooms, arranged with authentic mementoes, lead to a conservatory designed by Ernst Freud and now stocked with books, cards, customized mugs and novelties such as ‘Prof. Sigmund Freud’s Fruit & Nut Bar. The Non-Hysteria-Inducing Confection to be taken twice daily’.

  The house in the days of Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna, in her long residence, was the lair they all wanted to invade. Access was a rare privilege. The cupboard outside Anna’s bedroom was crammed with unrecorded letters.

  There are two monitor screens impertinently set in the high bourgeois dining room. Home movies flicker like candle flames in a dirty jar. The sunlit garden, once again, hosts a birthday celebration for the man who can barely stand to acknowledge the tributes, the floral gifts. And this happened here. Time knots and spirals; place is resolute.

  Two gentlemen in formal attire, courtiers from another dispensation, arrive with an enormous ledger, which they invite the professor to sign. He had already signed away, to other authorities, much of his estate. Now, they say, he must pen his full name; the preferred version – Freud – won’t serve. There is a point at which artists become branded single-name commodities: Picasso, Matisse, Bacon. Sigmund Freud is scratched in the register of the Royal Society beneath Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. They bring the book to him. He was fit enough, when drawn by powerful bonds of affection, to cross town to visit Lün in quarantine kennels at Ladbroke Grove: the Royal Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, was a step too far. All too soon Austrians and Germans in exile, men like Ludwig Meidner and Kurt Schwitters, would be quarantined by internment on the Isle of Man.

  Much of the bleached-out garden footage, looped within the twin monitors, lobes of memory, reminds me of my own dreams of a childhood assembled from surviving 16mm home movies. My memories are of the films, not the events behind them: parties, weddings, dead faces laughing. Those who acknowledged the camera and those who learned to ignore its nuisance. My mother before I was born. And my father’s father, the medical grandfather I never knew, holding up cake for his dog, the Scottie, to jump. The doctor was not well. He wears a hat. He looks like the established James Joyce, convalescent after the latest eye operation. Like Freud in Maresfield Gardens, he is a border crosser, a bringer of messages from the other side. The conscious wears away, the unconscious is unchanging.

  Freud disliked cameras, a mechanical system of evaluating the past to rival his own. And he never tolerated rivals. Whenever, as in the secure reservation, the Arcadia of Maresfield Gardens, confrontation became inevitable, a consequence of his fame or notoriety, he submitted, putting on a face as stern as a Greek tragic mask. He refused the Czech-born director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who requested permission to contrive a film around the person of the Viennese analyst. Freud could have entered our European art-cinema pantheon, alongside Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. Pabst, by 1930, had evolved a style acclaimed for its psychological prescience. He had what they called an ‘X-ray eye’ camera style, seeing through flesh and fabric. His London, designed, in Pandora’s Box, for Louise Brooks as a victim of Jack the Ripper, was a studio set in Berlin. ‘Analysis,’ Freud told Pabst, ‘does not lend itself to any kind of camera.’

  The most potent retrieval, the one that transfixed me in front of the monitors in that Maresfield Gardens dining room with the souvenir painting of the Alpine region where Freud loved to walk, showed a young relative, a youth in flannels, blazer, open-necked white shirt, paying his respects to his grandfather. The youth was Lucian Freud. Innocent of the will to challenge the camera as an instrument of record, Lucian walks beside the fading old man, across the lawn to a fishpond. Lucian and Sigmund, side by side for an instant, affect the matter of London. The official story in the guidebook does not record this visit. But letters from young Lucian are on display in a glass case: ‘Lieben Pap – we have put up the model railway. Have you already built the skyscraper?’

  Painters were the true analysts: Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff. Day after day in their studio-traps worrying at portraiture, persons and places of the city. Scraping off, starting again, setting aside. Like Sigmund Freud, they finesse a narrative, the facsimile of a higher reality. They stay close to railways, using tracks as ladders into past and future, ladders of transience and extinction. Ladders like strips of film. They sketch compulsively, their notebooks are records kept against future portraits.

  A different kind of painting, in high-walled mansions of the suburbs, is therapy. It does not belong to those who produce it. It is called ‘outsider art’. It requires tactful curation. A vault at the Wellcome Trust. In the now-decommissioned asylum at Netherne-on-the-Hill, the doctors decided to remove all unnecessary internal organs, in case they should be the source of social infection: madness, delirium, vision. They plucked teeth, hacked out tonsils, sliced at the appendix, the worms and tubes of the interior. At mealtimes, nurses came to the table with a great confectioner’s jar containing all the sets of teeth, which were handed out and then returned, when the chewing and mangling and dribbling was done.

  Climbing the stairs, and not using Freud’s lift, if it still exists, brings the paying visitor to the room with the death couch. We have already negotiated the portrait by Salvador Dalí, penned on blotting paper from surreptitious sketches: the Mekon bulb of the consulting analyst’s bald cranium and the frown, blind eyes behind the round white disks of the spectacles. The vortex of that great snail’s shell grafted on a rictus of cancerous pain spins me back down the route of our Overground walk: Dalí invokes Ballard. As the painting of the wolves in the tree by Sergei Pankejeff conjures thoughts of the remedial art of motorway asylums. And, more significantly, Angela Carter and her stories: ‘The Company of Wolves’, ‘The Werewolf’. ‘The wolfsong,’ Carter wrote, ‘is the sound of the rending you will suffer, itself a murdering.’ The beasts painted by Freud’s own Wolf Man are soft as white-furred pears. Their song is cloying.

  There is a photograph of an Alsatian, together with a poem presented to Fr
eud on his seventieth birthday, hung in Anna Freud’s room. The dog belonged to Anna and its name was Wolf. When Hitler took Blondi, his own German shepherd, with him into the Führerbunker of the Reich Chancellery, a puppy was born. He named it Wulf in the mistaken belief that his first name, Adolf, meant ‘noble wolf’. There are home movies in existence of the off-duty dictator and his dogs. Subdued familiars. Messengers from Carter’s dark forest.

  Nobody sits on, or even touches, Freud’s leathery death couch. Nearby, old films loop: summer gardens, heavy dresses, bouquets, cake, wine, beribboned dogs. The chow rescued from quarantine would not approach the bed in which the sick man lay. The smell of the gangrenous jaw was too rank. They had to cover what was left of Freud with mosquito netting to keep off the flies.

  Downstairs, the study is the heart of the house. The shelved books brought from Vienna. The artefacts. The lithograph, hung above the couch on which patients lay, was Une leçon clinque à la Salpêtrière by André Brouillet. The French clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, as showman, presenting a swooning, hysterical woman, in an operatic state of undress, to a room of men in dark clothing.

  Now the curtains are always secured against shifts of London light. Another pair of Woolfs, Leonard and Virginia, called on Freud, to discuss the publication by the Hogarth Press of his controversial text Moses and Monotheism. Would he consider changing the title? He would not. With a formal gesture of European courtesy, Freud presented Virginia with a flower, a narcissus. Later she recalled: ‘a screwed up shrunk very old man … inarticulate: but alert’.

  Mummy masks, bodhisattvas, amulets: grave goods with which to rehearse a burial. Egyptian cullings and Greek sphinxes, the residue of dealers in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, dominated every inch of the roped-off room in which Freud engaged with his last patients, and in which he wrote. There is barely space on the desk. With so many gods and votive offerings, it must have been like taking simultaneous dictation in a dozen dead languages. The classic and the primitive. Excavated relics snatched from their ritual purpose and made into palliative toys, symbols to invoke the metaphor of analysis as an extension of archaeology.

  I think of Freud as that original Hampstead archetype, the homeworker. The writer at his desk. Bedded down ahead of all those who would follow: Elias Canetti, Jack Trevor Story, Aidan Higgins, Margaret Drabble. Laptop labourers glimpsed through unshuttered windows. The artisans of literature who require no railway. A room of one’s own. A favoured pub on Devonshire Hill. On Flask Walk. A bookshop. A chess café. A heath on which to walk the dog. A shady pond around which to make new friends.

  The fantasy from the start of our tramp up Arkwright Road comes right back: the girl in the garden with her hair tangled in a tree, smoking a black cigar. The Freud Museum has a tradition of encouraging art. From time to time, taboos have been broken. The poet and performance artist Brian Catling, a presence as grave as an escapee from the expressionist asylum of Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse, a crazed professor or sane lunatic, approaches Freud’s desk with its ranks of twice-sanctified objects. Catling’s hair is snowy white. He is stridently besuited. For some reason his jowls flap with ribbons of sticking plaster: a madman who has taken a cutthroat razor to the mirror. He snatches up one of the precious figurines. His other hand is enclosed in a brown paper bag. The audience gasp at the impertinence. Catling/Mabuse gnaws on the phallic god like a starving dog splitting a bone.

  Outside, in the front garden, the poet who sings and performs as MacGillivray, and whose voice, unaccompanied, can certainly channel the dead, is woven into Freud’s tree. She leaks smoke, naked in a long fur-collared coat. Something of the density of the weave of dreams in that house is undone. And something is confirmed. Her young eyes, never blinking, halt the glaciers.

  Hampstead Heath to Kentish Town

  Without a visible railway, and cresting the hill, we free-associate. I had the feeling that I never quite qualified for Hampstead: financially, culturally, sartorially. It’s hard to get the look just right: Alan Bennett/Jonathan Miller corduroy, V-neck pullover and tie, bicycle Oxbridge, London Review of Books kitchen suppers on the lower slopes, the better part of Camden Town – and then Peter Cook, actors and authors, slewed bohemia with dosh, towards the leafy summit.

  But that was then, the days of renting rooms in houses where single gentlemen who left the BBC under a bit of a cloud shared a bathroom with bright, shiny, geometric girls from advertising agencies and hirsute Israeli men, maturing in theoretical architecture. On Downshire Hill, becalmed in the Freemasons Arms, that dead Python, Graham Chapman, gestured at the crossword and started mid-morning on lunchtime drinks. The preserved bedroom of John Keats was across the road. When I went to the bar for another heady draught cider – the debauchery! – I tried to see which black Penguin Graham wasn’t reading. Hoping it was The Odyssey. So that I could mutter under my breath, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.’

  It would take Muriel Spark in her pomp to do justice to the incipient drama of all this, the social and sexual interactions of the boarding-house group and the ones who are going to snap and do something worthy of a telephone call. Calls were public and not lightly made. Most of the rooms in these quiet hives were composing bits of books; none were published. Piano practice drifted over the reserved crescents like clouds of hay-fever pollen. I walked out to accompany Anna to the Underground station at the top of the hill, picking up newspapers along the way to be chopped into phrases that could be pasted to the page as accidental poetry. Hampstead High Street had a bookshop, a launderette on the corner of Willoughby Road, and a bank where you could walk straight up to the counter and ask them to cash your cheque for two pounds. Nobody was paying in.

  I remember being summoned, late on a Sunday evening, to take a call from an elderly Northerner I’d never met, a man with some Hampstead stories of his own. The poet Basil Bunting. I’d approached him, by way of his publisher Stuart Montgomery, about taking part in a film. Very sensibly, he asked about money. There wasn’t any. And nobody I hit on, at the BBC or in Germany, showed much interest in the topic.

  Fitzjohn’s Avenue was where we emerged and where I stopped talking about Freud. I told Andrew that Anna, when I first knew her in Dublin, thought I was making it all up, dreams and sex and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I must have an ulterior motive, trying to pitch such an unlikely tale. But although she had not at that point come across any of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, I had to confess that she was far more likely to actually read their books, when the time came, and to absorb what she needed. I dipped in and out, sampled, snacked and stole in my usual magpie fashion.

  Kötting wasn’t listening. We were a long way from Deptford and a fair step from a bed in Hackney. There were anecdotes on tap about his days ducking and diving in Camden Market, and watching all-night sessions at the Scala, but the silence of these hilltop streets unnerved him. We were exposed, chalk-upland pilgrims whose natural habitat has been invaded by sudden outcrops of sensible housing. Overbred cats who never step outside watched us from behind gleaming windows. I understood the banishment of weeds and windborne infiltrators from these polite gardens. I had worked here, always for Jewish exiles, usually widows, as a jobbing pound-an-hour gardener or heavy-handed grass manicurist, keeping fecund nature in check. On good days I might be asked to get rid of a box of books – or, just once, a folder of erotic Japanese prints. The last vestiges of an unredeemed husband.

  We were walking now in our own worlds. I knew there was a direct route, an uplands goat track, that would carry us straight to Hampstead Heath Station and on to the ley-line hub of Gospel Oak, but I wasn’t confident, in our present condition, of finding it. Edith Sitwell writes about Rimbaud and Verlaine in their vagabond days wandering through Camden Town. ‘They walked in parallel lines, at a dignified distance from each other and unnaturally straight, like two worn-out trams.’ Uncanny. And precisely how we came down Lyndhurst Road in a companionable slump.

  This was a much ol
der spine, referring back to my first days in London, my intimate association with the Northern Line. I never deviated far from what looked on the Underground map like a straight shot between Kennington (and the film school) and Warren Street, and then out along the north-west diagonal, through Mornington Crescent, with its ghosts of railway-haunting painters, Sickert, Auerbach, Kossoff, to Hampstead. A Dante progress designed by Frank Pick: Camden badlands to shining village on the hill. Submerged rivers ran in the same direction, from Hampstead ponds to the Thames. Striking east is a perversion of the natural order.

  Vestiges of Freud’s cigars still webbed the almond trees of Belsize. At the peak of his consumption, he got through twenty a day. When his aching jaw was locked and frozen after the latest operation to scrape away the sour fruits of cancer, he propped it open with a clothes peg: an aperture just wide enough to admit a black stogie. Beckett in Echo’s Bones, that ill-favoured tale of the afterlife, accuses smoke, the residue of crematorium ovens and the final wheeze of stoic philosophers perched on fence posts, of being the medium of exchange between the world of the living and the limbo of the recently dead. Sam had stepped down into enough riverside drinking dens where undispersed blue clouds stood in for the missing man, saturating furniture and fittings, staining portraits of clean-living athletic heroes with nicotine jaundice. ‘The dream of the shadow of the smoke of a rotten cigar.’